Running an email server seemed OK, back when UUCP was still my first address that wasn't constrained to a BBS (though tbh Citadel anti-vortexing networking [essentially: message de-duplication, across a network] is still leet and most will never understand because they missed out) or FidoNet and fellow SysOps would make jokes like, "sendmail.cf is Turing complete" and the "wiz" command still functioned because things hadn't devolved into a cesspool everywhere online with script kiddies going apeshit instead of respecting consent as a default for system access.
Later? After spammers started scraping SMTP addresses from NNTP/Usenet and made email a hellhole for everyone? Not so fun.
The ILOVEYOU virus? Was the beginning of it getting so much worse (some years before that I once had an email message which had a subject along the lines of: "Don't open, this email contains a virus!" with a message body similar to: "Silly rabbit, you can't get a virus via email" maybe I can dig it up on an old floppy somewhere buried deep in storage?)
I'd rather not even think about how email tech has somehow managed to devolve even further "thanks" to Google and a handful of other surveillance capitalism entities more or less ruining the intrinsic distributed/federated nature of email and all their SPF/DKIM/etc. malarkey. ;(
Bob Beck@'s spamd for greylisting was fantastic, ever so briefly as a way to tarpit spammers. But because of the way gmail retries? You would have to whitelist vast swaths of ARIN/etc. allocated space. That was probably a mistake in retrospect. I probably should have considered Google harmful then! Certainly all the signs were there pointing to their more recent conviction as a monopoly.
The "S" in SMTP used to mean Simple, it should have stayed that way! Being able to telnet (or netcat) to port 25 and test some basic functionality was a useful debugging metric and a fun way to raise some less tech savvy friends' eyebrows.
Sure, it's not that hard to do something similar after establishing a TLS tunnel now first, but that really isn't Simple anymore, is it?
Other protocols existed that actually attempted to solve the things SMTP was never meant to solve, e.g. SILC did a decent job at end-to-end encrypted realtime comms with Perfect Forward Secrecy (arguably a helluva lot better than SSL/TLS grafted onto other things such as email would ever dream of and earlier too).
Email could probably be good again, somehow, but it was never great. qmail and Postfix at least seemed as if they improved things in their respective eras even as Micro$oft was simultaneously making everything worse with Exchange.
So I don't fault others for not wanting to run an email server, even though it used to be a very low barrier to entry for a novice SysOp way back when. A rite of passage of running an email server, was like, baby steps, along with DNS. UUCP and SMTP are older than HTTP after all.
But then, do people even want to run web servers these days? It seems second nature to me, but I am probably an outlier. I get the impression very few are as nerdy as I, most monied morons will just shovel money over to Squarespace or some other horrid hosting brand is my guess?
Later? After spammers started scraping SMTP addresses from NNTP/Usenet and made email a hellhole for everyone? Not so fun.
The ILOVEYOU virus? Was the beginning of it getting so much worse (some years before that I once had an email message which had a subject along the lines of: "Don't open, this email contains a virus!" with a message body similar to: "Silly rabbit, you can't get a virus via email" maybe I can dig it up on an old floppy somewhere buried deep in storage?)
I'd rather not even think about how email tech has somehow managed to devolve even further "thanks" to Google and a handful of other surveillance capitalism entities more or less ruining the intrinsic distributed/federated nature of email and all their SPF/DKIM/etc. malarkey. ;(
Bob Beck@'s spamd for greylisting was fantastic, ever so briefly as a way to tarpit spammers. But because of the way gmail retries? You would have to whitelist vast swaths of ARIN/etc. allocated space. That was probably a mistake in retrospect. I probably should have considered Google harmful then! Certainly all the signs were there pointing to their more recent conviction as a monopoly.
The "S" in SMTP used to mean Simple, it should have stayed that way! Being able to telnet (or netcat) to port 25 and test some basic functionality was a useful debugging metric and a fun way to raise some less tech savvy friends' eyebrows.
Sure, it's not that hard to do something similar after establishing a TLS tunnel now first, but that really isn't Simple anymore, is it?
Other protocols existed that actually attempted to solve the things SMTP was never meant to solve, e.g. SILC did a decent job at end-to-end encrypted realtime comms with Perfect Forward Secrecy (arguably a helluva lot better than SSL/TLS grafted onto other things such as email would ever dream of and earlier too).
Email could probably be good again, somehow, but it was never great. qmail and Postfix at least seemed as if they improved things in their respective eras even as Micro$oft was simultaneously making everything worse with Exchange.
So I don't fault others for not wanting to run an email server, even though it used to be a very low barrier to entry for a novice SysOp way back when. A rite of passage of running an email server, was like, baby steps, along with DNS. UUCP and SMTP are older than HTTP after all.
But then, do people even want to run web servers these days? It seems second nature to me, but I am probably an outlier. I get the impression very few are as nerdy as I, most monied morons will just shovel money over to Squarespace or some other horrid hosting brand is my guess?